Tag Archives | romance

Around the time of the Summer of Love in 1967, Arthur Aron, then a UC Berkeley graduate student in psychology, kissed fellow student Elaine Spaulding in front of Dwinelle Hall. What they felt at that moment was so profound that they soon married and teamed up to investigate the mysteries of attraction and intimacy.

“I fell in love very intensely,” said Aron, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and research professor at Stony Brook University in New York. “Given that I was studying social psychology, just for fun I looked for the research on love, but there was almost none.”

So he took it on. In the nearly 50 years that Arthur and Elaine Aron have studied love, they have developed three dozen questions to create closeness in a lab setting. The result is not unlike the accelerated intimacy that can happen between strangers on an airplane or other close quarters.

GhostSingles.com has to be the best hook-up site on the internet. In contrast to most online dating destinations which cater to and glamorize the living, it offers the opportunity to meet deceased souls from ages 18 to 1000+. Browse profiles or chat with ghosts from the century of your choice whose deaths occurred in all manners:

A team from the University of Manchester analyzed 10 million marriages, using census data from the U.K. and inferring astrological signs from couples’ birth dates.
Astrologists have ideas about which signs make the best matches—a Sagittarius is better off with a Leo or Aquarius than a Cancer. But the University of Manchester team found that lonely hearts who worry about the zodiac are wasting their time.
The study concludes: "This research shows that astrological sign has no impact on the probability of marrying – and staying married to – someone of any other sign."

You can fall in and out of love every day, and experience the benefits of brief moments of “positivity resonance,” just by being open to other people. Via the Atlantic:

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions, presents scientific evidence that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting yearning and passion that characterizes young love or sustains a marriage; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store.

Slate writes that vindictive Valentine’s cards, mailed anonymously, were once as popular as romantic ones. Is it time to bring back the tradition?

These “vinegar valentines” were produced between the middle of the 19th century and middle of the 20th. The tradition was quite popular. Some historians argue that comic valentines—of which vinegar valentines were one type—made up half of all U.S. valentine sales in the middle of the 19th century.

Vinegar valentines were a socially sanctioned chance to criticize, reject, and insult. They were often sent without a signature, enabling the sender to speak without fear. These cards were sent not just to significant others, friends, and family but to a larger social circle. People might post a vinegar card to a store clerk, a teacher, or a neighbor.

Possibly superior to online dating? Via Paleofuture, on when the new romance rage was organizing marriage by odor:

Dating sites claim they can find you the perfect match by using algorithms. This idea–wanting to make the frustrating world of romantic love into something quantifiable–is nothing new. The April 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine ran an article by Hugo Gernsback, the magazine’s publisher, which examined the “scientific” ways to determine if a marriage will succeed or fail.

Gernsback claims that more marriages are probably wrecked by body odors than any other cause. During the body odor test, the couple is made to smell each other (“not a pleasant experience,” Gernsback opines) by one person being placed inside a large capsule with a hose coming out the top. The hose is led to the nose of the other person and if the smells aren’t found too objectionable (again, measured by devices strapped to the chest and wrist) then the romantic pairing is deemed safe.

Japanese erotic hotels famously offer themed fetish rooms that transport guests to the oddest of locations. Artist Ai Hasegawa hopes to go further by creating plans for an Extreme Environment Love Hotel with rooms that simulate physically impossible locales — are these the honeymoons of the future? She explains:

The Extreme Environment Love Hotel simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity.

How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us? Recent figures speculate that around 10% of children are now conceived by In Vitro Fertilisation. The world around us and our reproductive technologies have given rise to new ideas of what sex is or could be and where it stands between our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations and our human fetishes and desires.

The Irish Independent notes that in another time and place, a human head was the most thoughtful of amorous presents:

While most couples celebrate Valentine’s Day with flowers, chocolates and candlelit dinners, archivists have unearthed evidence that a less savoury romantic gesture was practised historically – bestowing a severed head on a loved one.

This left-field approach to love-making, practised by 19th-century Taiwanese aborigines, was discovered in the 150-year-old letters of botanical explorers.

Taking someone’s head after killing them was a ritualistic part of life in the culture until the 1930s and suitors would present severed heads to potential partners to woo them or to brides to celebrate their marriage, according to archive material in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

The ritual, highlighted as part of the Archive Awareness Campaign, is revealed in a letter to Kew written in 1864 by Kew gardener Richard Oldham, who explains why he cannot explore the Taiwanese mountains near Tamsui.

Two infamous Swedish murderers, the “Skara Cannibal” and the “Vampire Woman,” hope to get married, according to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper. The couple met at their high-security psychiatric ward in eastern Sweden, the paper said, and flirted over Internet chat rooms.

Isakin Jonsson, known as the ”Skara Cannibal,” was convicted in March 2011 of killing of his girlfriend, Helle Christensen, a mother of five, Expressen said. After stabbing her to death and cutting off body parts, he ate some of them.

Gustafsson was convicted in 2010 of the stabbing death of a father of four in Stockholm, the paper said. She wrote chilling lyrics on her blog about killing people and posted pictures of herself dressed as a vampire with bloody lips.